Probably the most important role that the media have to play in society is framing. Human beings are predisposed to understand the world in terms of stories, and storytelling is what news reports do: boil down a giant pile of facts and events and quotes and opinions into a coherent narrative, so that readers gain an understanding from it. Even things that might seem like they’re not stories — charts, listicles — really are, because they select which facts to bring to the fore and how to present them. One of the biggest challenges of journalism is deciding how to tell a story that’s both engaging and accurate.
Which brings us to today’s Colorado Sun headline and subhead:
Kansas City’s women’s sports stadium hit big. Can Denver’s National Women’s Soccer League home go bigger?
CPKC Stadium, America’s first women’s sports venue, has broken ticket records and launched a development boom in KC. Denver’s City Council isn’t sold on helping to fund a sequel.
That is very much a story right there, well summed up: Kansas City’s women’s soccer stadium has been a success; will Denver follow suit or decline to fund one? Our job not just as readers but as media critics is to determine: Does this article provide evidence to support this framing, or is it trying to sell a story that somebody else wants it to tell?
Some selected snippets:
Even with the team on the West Coast late on a Saturday night in April, 60 fans gathered at Friction Beer Co. to watch the women from KC take on the San Diego Waves.
“It’s 11 p.m. here in KC and there’s still a full bar watching the game,” said Monica Bradley, who was rocking the Current’s signature teal kit. She attended the stadium’s inaugural game last year.
That’s all well and good, but 60 fans going to a sports bar to watch a road game does not in itself a development boom make — if the Current didn’t exist, those same fans might be (and according to virtually all economic studies trying to measure spending impact of sports teams, would be) at the bar watching some other sport, or spending their money elsewhere. And in any event, even if “here’s a full sports bar, you can see it with your own eyes!” is a dramatic image, 60 people is a tiny drop in the bucket in an economy the size of Kansas City’s.
NWSL Denver is breaking records as it prepares for its 2026 debut. The owners paid a $110 million franchise fee, the highest in NWSL in history.
On April 7, the team surpassed 10,000 season ticket deposits, the most in NWSL history.
The narrative takes kind of a weird turn here, as NWSL Denver‘s owners paying a league-record franchise fee and having a ton of season ticket deposits is seemingly presented as reasons Denver should spend $70 million on land and infrastructure for a new stadium. As opposed to, say, reasons why owners Rob Cohen (not a billionaire) and Mellody Hobson (not a billionaire, but her husband George Lucas is) could afford to build a stadium without government aid.
Many paragraphs later, the Kansas City Current stadium is revealed to be “privately financed” (it actually got $6 million in state tax credits), but only because that team’s owners “did not need to invest in the amount of new infrastructure that [Denver’s] Santa Fe Yards will require.” (Only $20 million of the public’s $70 million is slated for cleanup; the rest is for buying the land, something the Current owners did out of their own pocket.)
The public-funding request pales in comparison to the public portion of the $168 million used to build Coors Field, which opened in 1995, and the $400 million spent on Empower Field at Mile High, which opened in 2001.
True, though also the soccer stadium would only have 14,500 seats while those other two are each over 50,000, so you’d expect it to be cheaper.
Cohen said Denver was awarded a team over other cities because of its promise of a stadium, and that the franchise is dependent on it….
No matter the economic situation or the cost, Cohen says, Denver NWSL players will get their own pitch.
“I can unequivocally tell you we won’t abandon this project because it’s important to our core values of what we’re trying to do, it’s important to what we believe and we made a commitment,” Cohen said.
So the arrival of the team is dependent on public funding for a new stadium, or isn’t? Or is this just “We will get this $70 million in taxpayer money by hook or by crook?” Narrative is getting muddy here.
Every major men’s sports franchise in Colorado has its own stadium.
Dear readers, I present to you the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche.
Two of the Current’s owners, Chris and Angie Long, purchased 19.3 acres of the 78.6 acre riverfront from PortKC to create an entertainment district and build 1,000 apartments over 10 years. A $1 billion bond was issued by PortKC for the riverfront redevelopment which began in March 2024, and the city’s RideKC streetcar is being extended to the riverfront. No bond money went to the stadium project.
[Port KC Director of Communications] Meredith Hoenes credits the stadium and Current’s popularity for the growth spurt on the riverfront. “We love it. It’s a gem for Kansas City.”
Okay, hold up: The development “launched” by the Kansas City stadium was actually partly stuff built by the team’s owners and partly stuff built by the public port district? If you build a new streetcar line and find a developer to build apartments along it, it’s hard to credit a soccer stadium with only a 13-game home schedule as the catalyst that made it all happen. I mean, it’s easy for the communications director of the port district to credit it that way, but that’s literally her entire job to say things like that, she shouldn’t count as a development expert.
Denver City Council’s Platte River Committee votes on Wednesday.
The article does quote two of the council’s 13 members, Sarah Parady and Amanda Sandoval, as making skeptical statements about the money involved (“We are facing the collapse of global financial markets, and I don’t believe this stadium will ever be built” and “We’re being asked to invest $70 million in a time of economic hardship … and we’re the last person to get repaid from the TIF,” respectively). But that all jibes with the story being told: Kansas City has had a big success with its stadium, yet Denver’s city council is hesitant to follow in its footsteps. The facts that Denver is being asked to spend $70 million where K.C. did not, that the Denver team owners seemingly could afford to pay the costs themselves and may even have hinted that they will if necessary, and that K.C.’s “success” probably had little to do with the stadium — all that gets left on the cutting-room floor, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The last, and maybe most important, question to ask here is who’s determining the way this story was framed: Colorado Sun reporter — er, journalism student — Lincoln Roch? His editors? The sources, including Denver team president Jen Millet, who Roch relied on to explain the story to him? Those parts we can’t know, but we can guess, given what we know about who tends to get called for these articles — speaking of which, there’s a sports stadium expert right there in Denver who here plays the role of Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Story, guess he’ll have to wait for the director’s cut.
Can someone explain the difference between a men’s soccer stadium and a women’s soccer stadium?
I asked CHAT GPT and got this:
Stadium Design: No Built-In Gender Difference
From an architectural or functional standpoint, there’s no inherent difference between a stadium for men’s soccer and one for women’s soccer. Both need:
A regulation-size pitch (same dimensions for men and women)
Locker rooms, training facilities
Stands/seating for spectators
Broadcast setups, media zones, etc.
Different graffiti in the restrooms?
The difference in Denver is that the Rapids stadium is in a lame suburb and the Rapids owners don’t want a tenant.
The difference between men’s soccer stadiums and women’s at least in KC is about 10,000 seats. The men played in Arrowhead but it was embarrassing to have 60,000 empty seats. So they build a 20,000 seat soccer only stadium. The women’s team probably would not fill the 20,000 seat men’s stadium so they build a much smaller stadium.
With that said women’s soccer is very popular now because most young girls play it. The teams and players also do a great job promoting and interacting with the fans. Still the players are poorly paid and it remains to be seen how it plays out long term. I can remember the KC indoor soccer team outdrawing the NBA team in the early 80s.
The other factor with the KC stadium is they plan to use it for outdoor concerts which makes it much more profitable.
It’s certainly common in many cities to have a larger stadium for men’s soccer and a small one for women’s soccer, though there are exceptions: Gotham FC plays at the Red Bull New York stadium in New Jersey, and I went to a Barcelona Femeni Champions League match in December at the same stadium where I saw the Barça men’s team play a few days later. See also the ongoing debate over whether the Dallas Wings should move to the Dallas Mavericks’ home arena once Paige Bueckers debuts for them this spring. So “men’s sports need more seats” isn’t always true — and it’s absolutely not always true that it’s more cost-effective to build two separate stadiums for the same sport just to avoid one team having a few thousand empty seats.
As for outdoor concerts making anything much more profitable, I’m going to have to ask to see data on that. There are vanishingly few acts that play outdoor stadium shows, and most of those are only in July and August, which just happened to already be two of the busiest months on the (U.S.) soccer calendar.
“Embarrassment” over empty seats is one of my favorite ridiculous/fake reasons for building sport-specific facilities. Packing 10,000 fans into the best 10,000 seats of a 50,000 seat stadium is no different from filling a 10,000 seat stadium.
Yeah, I know, “atmosphere”. $hundreds-of-millions is a lot to pay for some perceived difference in “atmosphere”.